One of the things about working on a big boat is that there’s a lot of everything. Lots of planks, lots of fasteners. Right now, Coronet has a lot of frames to be built, so you can expect to be seeing a lot of these fellows for quite some time.

It’s during operations like frame construction that you can really appreciate the utility of a good lofting floor. This lofting floor provides a solid base for laying out really heavy timbers, and lots of them.

One particular advantage of this type of elevated lofting floor is that clamps can fit in between the timbers and provide an essentially infinite number of hold down locations.

All these clamps can hold multiple futtocks in position so that Leo can drill for all of the trunnels at once.

While Leo drills for trunnels, Claes uses one of the big circular saws to taper the ends of the frames.

The taper gives a solid landing for the frames up against the deadwood.

With the futtocks assembled into frames and bolted to a deck beam, the whole affair is craned over to the boat. Remember that line that was strung up above the centerline of the boat? Here’s a plumb bob coming down from it to the centerline of the keel.

The frame assembly has a centerline marked on the deck beam. The crew aligns that centerline with the plumb bob line to make sure that the assembly is located exactly on the boat’s centerline. With that orientation established, Chris can drill and fasten the base of the frame to the keel and deadwood.

Here’s a tool you won’t find in your home shop.

The rod in this drill has a slot milled into it, and a tool steel blade is inserted into the slot and held in place with a set screw. What’s the purpose? It makes custom counter bores.

What’s a counter bore?

Say you’re attaching something with a nut and washer, but you don’t want the nut and washer to protrude from the face of the thing you’re fastening. Like, say, a frame.

You create a little pocket to sink the nut and washer into. That pocket is called a counter bore.

The rod in this counter boring tool is the same diameter of the hole drilled for the bolt. You insert the rod in your bolt hole, fire up the drill, and the spinning length of tool steel carves out a hole exactly the diameter you’ll need for your nut and washer. If you need different size counter bore, change out the tool steel insert with a larger or smaller one. Very simple, and infinitely customizable.